Recollections of Stefan Wolpe




Claus Adam
Haim Alexander
Ronald Anderson
Mordecai Ardon
Menachem Avidom
Milton Babbitt
Claude Ballif
Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg
Bernard Benoliel
Elmer Bernstein
Yohanan Boehm
Franz Boensch
Herbert Brün
John Cage
John Carisi
Elliott Carter
Nira Chen
Robert Creeley
Fielding Dawson
Morton Feldman
Bill Finegan
Joseph Fiore
Edith Gerson-Kiwi
Alexander Goehr
Edwin Hymovitz
Toshi Ichyanagi
Irma Jurist Neverov
Zvi Kaplan
M. William Karlins
Bruria Kaufman
Basil King
Gottfried Michael Koenig
Peter Jona Korn
Leopold Last
Sinai Leichter
Edward Levy
Ursula Mamlok
Josef Marx
Jacob Maxin
Leonard B. Meyer
Hilda Morley Wolpe
Thomas Nee
Joy Tudor Nemiroff
Yoko Ono
Raoul Pleskow
Trude Rittman
Zvi Rosen
Howard Rovics
George Russell
Ruth Samsonov Cooper
Eddie Sauter
Tony Scott
Ralph Shapey
Fred Sherry
Harvey Sollberger
Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
Josef Tal
Ron Thomas
Curt Trepte
David Tudor
Esteban Vicente
Jonathan Williams
Beatrice Witkin
Gerald Wolpe
Irma Wolpe Rademacher
Katharina Wolpe
Charles Wuorinen
Eli Yarden


Claus Adam

I studied with Wolpe for the first time in the summer of '42, and in '43 I came back to New York and was drafted into the Army. I was back in New York within two weeks, because I got into an Air Force show by Moss Hart called Winged Victory. I was very lucky, because then I was in New York for six months, and during those six months I studied a great deal with Wolpe. We began right from the very beginning. I said I only knew some harmony and a little counterpoint but had never learned systematically. I asked Stefan to start me off completely from scratch. And he did with basic harmony. I remember very well the relationship of fifths within the basic key. I would also have to do keyboard harmony with him. He would ask me to go from, let's say, D minor to F-sharp major; then he would show me how many extra steps you can take in order to solidify the new key. You can sometimes do it in three steps, and sometimes in forty steps, if you know how, which is what Bruckner and Mahler did over a long period of time. He knew this system very well. Then I said, look, I've never really had thorough counterpoint, so we went through Palestrina counterpoint right from scratch. We used the Jeppesen book.

At a certain point he said, "That's enough of that. If you want to go on and on and on with that and understand it to its fullest, you can become a professor of counterpoint, but let's go on to Bach--to free counterpoint and to linear and harmonic counterpoint." That was a revelation. I remember one session when he looked for a fugue, and said, "Well, that's a very usual kind of fugue, and that's sort of standard, and, ah, here's one. Now that's an exception." And then he would show me why it was an exception, and the ingenious devices of a man like Bach. Stefan was never interested in the ordinary, the obvious, he always was interested in why did the composer turn to that or another idea, and what was the germ, and how did it develop in his mind. He would even project. He'd say, "Well, he could have gone in this direction." He would make some sketches and say, "Now that's another possibility." And this is where he was the greatest teacher, because he opened up your process of thinking how to develop what possibilities you had. That was the great thing.

I went from that step to chromatic harmony, then to whole-tone harmony, and then to completely free harmony. But he always helped to put you in focus. You had to have a certain harmony that would be structural in the piece, not just anything. The piece had to have a shape added to some kind of conviction. Then he also took me for a little while through serial technique. I must say, I turned off on serial technique. It didn't interest me. Atonal was what I was talking about.

Later on he had all these analysis classes, where you take a work of Bartök or a Beethoven sonata and analyze it. It was a revelation that one could see music that way. One could project possibilities from the material. They were really very exciting. I remember later on, when I joined the Juilliard Quartet in '55, I went up to the president of the Juilliard School and asked why a man like Wolpe isn't at a school like Juilliard, because he doesn't just give the ordinary kind of analysis--sixteen bars and eight bars and four bars transition, and this was that key, and this is this key. He wasn't interested in that kind of analysis. He was interested in what made a piece work, what was the germinal idea and how did it develop. And the president said to me, "I would never have a man like Wolpe teach here, because I once attended a rehearsal in which the ensemble played a couple of wrong notes and he didn't know the difference." That is why he wouldn't have him at the Juilliard School. That was his answer. Other people tried, but it was hopeless.

Then I had to go away for a couple of years. As soon as I was out of the Army, I settled in New York and really went to work with him again for a couple of years and began to write some pieces, not just shorter pieces. The first thing I wrote was a string quartet, and the second piece was a piano sonata. It's being played again this year. I didn't study orchestration with him extensively. I had to orchestrate a number of things with him, but orchestration was not a big problem for me, because I played in an orchestra. I had studied a lot of scores. However, he opened my eyes to certain kinds of sonorities, certain types of doublings, or overlaid sounds I'd never thought of.

I haven't been around a lot of other teachers, so I can't tell, but it's hard for me to imagine any other teacher having the kind of vision, the kind of insight that he had. He almost detected what the composer was trying to do before it was happening, and there was something very special about that.

Born in Indonesia, Claus Adam (1917-1983) moved to New York in 1929, where he later studied cello with Emanuel Feuermann, conducting with Leon Barzin, and eventually composition with Wolpe. In 1948 he formed the New Music Quartet and then joined the Juilliard String Quartet, which he left after twenty years to devote his attention to composition. Adam was also active as a teacher and held positions at the Juilliard School and Mannes College. Interview: AC, New York, 19 November 1980.

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Haim Alexander

Every week [was a lesson], and it happened sometimes that I couldn't find him at all, because he just forgot. That was not only with me, that was with everybody. If he was in the middle of a composition, he would not take care. But mostly I got the lesson, and then he sat down, and he scribbled. He gave me a row and said, "Write now a piece for violin and another instrument." And he introduced me to strict twelve-tone writing.

Stefan's music always made a really immense impact on me. I mean, you couldn't say, "all right, neutral." What I said to his personality I would say to his music. He was a man you could accept wholeheartedly, or you could reject wholeheartedly. So with me, first of all, I loved him. I liked him very much as a personality. He made an impact on me as a young fellow. I was here alone, I had nobody, and he was like a father to me.

I would say he gave me the beginning of what I could call a bridge to Darmstadt, and Darmstadt was my second shock. But the shock of Wolpe was perhaps not as great as of Darmstadt, because after all, I was in the mean time embedded in this Mediterranean thing. And suddenly I see Stockhausen, and Cage, and Wolpe on the other side again. I feel that I missed a lot of experiences. We were here in Schlaraffenland [fool's paradise], and we forgot that music was going on in the world. We did not know what's going on.

On the one hand, it absolutely transformed me in a way. I thought that it must be a man with an absolute genius personality who is able to do such things in such a manner. That he is fearless about what he is doing gave a real impact on me. On the second hand, I was also a little bit influenced by the people around me who where disgusted mostly. And mainly the mediocre musicians, who did not understand. And they laughed silently and said, "What do you think about him?" And I said, "It's a great impact." "Ah, it's rubbish, you throw it away, it's nothing." I would not say that everything which Stefan has done would give tribute to my own thinking, that I would accept it wholeheartedly. But on the whole, I would say that certainly he was such an outstanding personality and composer that the great things he has done were really some things that could not have been done by anybody else. He had his own style. And in his own style he made on me a great impact. And sometimes I was also against it.

We discussed very often how the music should be taught. And he said, "For my opinion, you shouldn't start with Beethoven or Mozart, you should start with twentieth century. And your students should be aware of what's going on today, not of yesterday. Then, when they want to learn also about the great music of the past, either they should do it on their own, or later on. But it is for my opinion a fault of starting with old music, and then perhaps the danger that they will never get to the twentieth century. They will stick to this, and you cannot develop them." I discussed these things later with many, many great musicians, like Penderecki, and Ligeti, and Berio (he comes quite often here and is quite a good friend). "I would not accept this way of thinking," all these men said. "First of all, let them learn the way of Fux counterpoint, and so on, let them have their way of basic knowledge, and then they may do whatever they think." Wolpe was in that day when I met him exactly the other way around.

Born in Berlin (1915), Haim Alexander studied music there, then immigrated to Jerusalem in 1936. He studied with Irma and Stefan Wolpe and graduated from the Academy of Music in 1945. He later taught composition at the Rubin Academy and improvisation at the Institut Jacques-Dalcroze in Geneva. Interview: AC, Jerusalem, 26 April 1985.

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Ronald Anderson

After a recital I got a very, very good review in the New York Times. Then I got a call from CBS Television Camera Three. They gave me a program to do anything I wanted. I was so impressed with Wolpe, with his concern, with his music, and just as a human being, that I gave the whole program to him just because of his impact as a composer. We played the Saxophone Quartet again, and Bob Miller played Form, and then we had an interview conducted by the narrator of the program with Wolpe. And that I believe drew me into his circle inadvertently. I didn't plan it that way.

I'm attracted sometimes to a piece just because it's hard, it's a challenge. As a player I like to conquer a piece. I've done that many times and ended up half the time with a piece that I don't like. Wolpe's music I adore. I like the turn of a phrase. I think I understand it from the heart. I've got a copy of the Oboe Sonata right here. It's about fifty pages long. I have taught his Oboe Sonata to trumpet students just to play the phrases and get a handle on that kind of music. His music has a gutsy appeal. It's disciplined, highly disciplined, but doesn't lose it's masculinity in the process. It has a sense of beauty, not complexity for the sake of complexity. It has humanity, warmth, occasional ugliness, but that's just as a confluence of some things coming together in a kind of dissonance of a chaotic sort, and rather quickly opening out again. That could be ugliness, or at least a chaoticness for the moment, and then kind of releasing. A gripping kind of feeling. He was a passionate man, mercurial. That's what appeals to me a lot musically. I've played All Set of Babbitt--gutsy, great little piece, jazzy, jazz-oriented, as is a lot of Wolpe, of course.

I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, whence a lot of jazz came and comes--Ellington, Bobby Brookmeyer. I saw the Sauter-Finegan Band back in Missouri. Both Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan were wonderful. I think both had lessons with Wolpe. And I came to find out that all these wonderful ideas came from one guy, Wolpe. When I came to New York I played a little jazz. I gradually got more and more out of date with it. I'm talking to Gil Evans, to these giants of jazz. "Where did you get your ideas? Where did you get these crazy ideas?" "Wolpe. From a classical composer, Wolpe. Who was kind of a strainer. He would strain your brain. Not change it. You would go to him as a jazz arranger, and you would come back a jazz arranger, but he would strain you, help you change your ideas, not his, yours." And the man could do that in so many different fields--in choral music, piano music, chamber music, and jazz--drew me.

Ronald Anderson (b. 1934) is a member of the Composers Conference, the Group for Contemporary Music, and was principal trumpet with the New York City Ballet for many years. Professor Anderson is on the music faculty of New York University and taught at SUNY-Purchase, SUNY-Stony Brook, and Columbia University. Interview: AC, New York City, 12 December 1982.

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Mordecai Ardon

I came to Berlin from Poland with a few friends and went with my friends to the museum. It was the first time that I had seen a museum. I was born in a very small town, a village. I saw modern paintings for the first time, and I was very enthusiastic and explained to my friends what I am seeing. And suddenly a woman with a black veil was standing and listening. Isn't it the police? And she approached and said, "Who are you? Are you a student?" "Yes, yes, I'm a student." "Are you a student of art?" She gave me her card, Schlomann, Dahlem, Park Strasse 96, and said, "Come to me." After about a month I came to Dahlem. It was a very rich district, and I went in, and she came and said, "It's a long time that you let me wait for you. What are you doing?" "I am drawing." "I want to see your drawings." Another day I came with drawings, and Stefan came from the cellar and said, "Schlomann told me about you." To make it short, she wrote a letter to the Bauhaus, I think to Paul Klee, and I became a student of the Bauhaus. It was the beginning of the friendship with Stefan. He was years in the cellar by Schlomann. The cellar became like another home. Schlomann was a wonderful woman. She was interested in homeless people and went in search for such people. We were both her children. She had a son, but we were much closer to her.

Stefan several times came with me to the Bauhaus, because there was a group of Viennese students that were very, very close to him. It was Friedl Dicker, Franz Singer, T&nbspry-Ary-Adler Buschmann. If I am not mistaken he had more than amicable relations with Friedl Dicker. When he was visiting Weimar, he was staying with Friedl. She was a genius, sans doute, she was great. So we became three young friends, Stefan, and Friedl, and I. And then Ben Sion, a writer, publisher of Hölderlin. Stefan was very influenced by the poetry of Hölderlin. Stefan wasn't a student, he was like a guest there, he was with us. Because at the Bauhaus they didn't want to be professors, but masters. We were not students, we were Lehrlinge, Gesellen. Stefan was one of the most important points in their group.

And he came to the Bauhaus and tried to paint, to make some drawings. I don't remember if they were really good. It was like an amusement. It wasn't really his way of expression. His way of expression was music. He was a musician and tried to make music at the Bauhaus too, especially because Klee was a wonderful violinist and very interested in modern music. But I'm not sure if they came together. We had another connection, it was Johannes Itten. I became a pupil of Itten in 1920. Stefan was very influenced by him, by his way of teaching. He was a genius as a teacher, much more than as a painter. He had not only a philosophical viewpoint, but his viewpoint appealed to us very much, the way he makes something near you. Itten wanted the expression very powerful. I will give you an example. He came one day and said, "We want to draw a tiger, and you will begin it this way. You know what a tiger is, first, you have to growl like a tiger. And then suddenly, he say, "Now!" In a minute we make a tiger. His way was to shock us and to make us to forget all things we have seen, to bring out the fast feelings. And this way was very near to Stefan too. He got that. Itten was for us this magician that makes us free. He frees something in us. All of the other masters, even Klee, and Klee was a good man, was suspicious about Itten's method. For us it was something very wonderful. Stefan attended a few [of Itten's classes], enough to get an idea. Itten was a very strange person. He became Mazdaznan. All of us became Mazdaznan, and vegetarian, Stefan too. Stefan also had discussions with Gertrude Grunow, a psychological teacher. I didn't understand her well. One day she said to me, "Bronstein, come in. I am fearing you have to take care of you. The green color will be very dangerous for you. And the water too."

After a while [in Berlin] Stefan told me, "You know, there is a meeting from the Communist Party." I say, "So that's fine, that's very near me." And he says, "To me too. How fine." And so we became friends from another viewpoint too, not only from the artistic viewpoint. I entered the Communist Party. I don't know if Stefan did. He was very close, but I'm not sure if he was really a member. I founded a group of designers in Berlin to make the Das Kapital of Marx more understandable to the workers, because they cannot understand it. We said we have to be more engagé, not to make now paintings. We have to help. Stefan was in this group too. We made films. Stefan was deeply involved with us, not in making the films, but every day he was there. How it is going on, how we are solving this question or another question. We were all of us in the Kulturfront der Arbeiterpartei. There were Bert Brecht, Alexander Granach, Eisler, Wangenheim. Granach was close to Stefan, and with Eisler I think there was some relations. But our group of designers were close but a separate group. We made art as a medium to help the workers to be good revolutionaries. Our group in visual art, Stefan in his music came with Wangenheim in the Mausefalle. He was in the way of a political musician. I'm not sure if this is great art today, but in this time, for me, for Stefan, for Friedl, for all of us, it was the only way to make something for the revolution and to make something for us. It is the only way then. We have to be modern, and what means modern? Modern means to serve the Communist Party. Our films they were to be sent to Moscow. I showed the film to a great gathering of about 500 or more workers in a school in Neuköln, a part of Berlin. It was two weeks before Hitler came. The films were not sent to Moscow, it was impossible.

His parents were petit-bourgeois. The mother was a very beautiful woman, the father a bit heavy. I don't think that the relations between Stefan and his parents were good. I had a feeling he is strange in his own home. He was much more open by Schlomann. She became more and more like a mother. Stefan wasn't at all Jewish in this time. He had not Jewish feelings. I became interested in the Kabbalah, the Zohar, and he asked me for this very small book [German translation of the Zohar]. I gave it to him. After a while he gave it back to me without any remarks. I don't think that he really had a Jewish feeling. All of us, I have to say, we wanted to escape the Jewishness. Really to escape. With me it is very strange, because I am from a very Hassidic family. I was in the Yeshiva, but nevertheless, I wanted to escape it. Stefan too, more than I.

In Palestine Stefan was in the way to become a musical leader, because he went in the kibbutzim. The kibbutz was the new human being that was born, and his feeling was, "This is my people." And he became more attached, not to Jewishness, but to the Israeli form of Jewishness, collectively. He thought this is the new Jewishness, this is the new society. This is the Jews, and they are making the new men in the new world.

Stefan was very eccentric, very. He was very stirnig, emphatic. He wanted all things that he sees, this is right, and what is other he has to make clear that isn't right. He was a special kind of a human being. In his behavior, in his kind of asking questions, of answering. He was very helpful, he had a lot of feelings for people. But he could change between hours. If it was a relation, suddenly tomorrow it can break up. If somebody, something happened, pouf. Philosophy with Stefan is mixed with personal feelings and personal things. But all of us, we loved him. I am not exaggerating, he had a special feeling for me, and I a special feeling for him. We were really like brothers. For years we saw each other sometimes every day. My wife found him a bi§chen zuviel [a bit much].[When he left Palestine] for us, and for me personally, it was not only a shock, it was a disaster. I didn't become a Zionist, but I became an Israeli. I had the feeling that my friend Stefan is a bit of a traitor that he's going away. Because, where is the new man? He's here, not in Europe.

He was the only friend that I had. He was the only one. You see, the human being is not born alone. There is always a group of human beings who are thrown out. This group are real friends. You have colleagues-friends, but they are not with you together. Stefan was thrown with me together, so he was the only friend. The others, I have a lot of friends, I have admirers, I have people that are with me, but they not thrown with me together. He was from this group. As he was in Israel, something happened to him too. Not in a political way, and not in an artificial morality, not Zionist. It was something like destiny. He felt that there is something he belongs to. He was a Jew by description, but not a Jew. He became involved, not in Jewishness, but in some primary feelings. He was not brought up as a Jew, but he suddenly had a feeling for these strange roots. He felt that it is something for him too. After the war in '52 or '53 he came back, he was searching for this strange point. This was the purpose of coming back, nothing more. He didn't find it, and went away.

Mordechai Ardon (1896-1992), an Israeli artist of Polish birth, was born Max Bronstein. He studied at the Bauhaus, Weimar, under Klee, Kandinsky, Itten and Lyonel Feininger from 1920 to 1925. In 1926 he studied painting in Munich with Max Doerner. He immigrated to Palestine, where in 1935 he taught at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem and was its director from 1940 to 1952. Interview: AC, Paris, 27 November 1979.

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Menachem Avidom

Michael Tauber the well-known German conductor settled in this country in '33, and then they had just a string corpus of twelve musicians. I wrote the Polyphonic Suite, and when I came to Jerusalem for the rehearsal, I met Wolpe. I was maybe the only one who wrote in a style that was absolutely out of bounds here in the country. It was a polyphonic, dodecaphonic and very advanced work. That was at the YMCA, and I remember when Wolpe came over to me. I don't remember if he congratulated me on the work, or if we just spoke about the work. He was an original. He talked very plain and frank words. I don't think that he ever meant to approach somebody with compliments or something like that in order to obtain something for himself. He was not the type. We met before he left, when he asked me to take over his three students . [ . . .]

I think [his music is] absolutely original. It suits the person I knew (although not so very well, we had just a few meetings). This music is very personal, his own. He did not rely very much on what he studied with Webern or the Viennese School whatsoever, or the German School. He was very apart from Hindemith. That was Jacobi's path, a pupil of Hindemith. His vocal music that he wrote for the kibbutzim I don't think was what he wanted to write, but what he had to write. And that's what reminds me of Eisler and of Kurt Weill a little bit, this sort of socialist [music]. [ . . .]

He couldn't see any future for himself here. He was right, because after he left in the early and late 1940s that nationalistic current started. Everybody was trying to build something on his national soil that brought us back to the Mediterranean music. That wouldn't have been a place for him, not at all, because he was like a block. He had his views on music. Were he back today, he would be very successful in this country, because there was a certain tiredness of that national style. We wanted to be more universal, international. So if he was here from the 1960s on, he would have found his place. [. . . ] He was much more far-sighted than we were.

Born in Russia (1908), Menachem Avidom studied at the Paris Conservatoire and emigrated to Palestine in 1925. He received numerous awards for his compositions, including the 1961 Israel State Prize for the opera Alexandra ha' Hashmonait. His professional activities include secretary general of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, chair of the Israel Composers' League, music critic, and, from 1955, director general of the Israeli performing rights society, ACUM. Interview: AC, Tel Aviv, 22 April 1985.

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Milton Babbitt

I wrote the Second Quartet in 1953-54 for the New Music Quartet, of which Claus Adam was the cellist. I had to leave for London and never heard the first performance of this piece. When Stefan heard that they were going to play this work, I now recall that he came to rehearsal at Claus's apartment and looked at the score with me, asked some questions, and we had a rather general conversation about the work. Now at that time Claus had given Stefan a copy of my manuscript of the Quartet.

The piece of mine that Stefan pressed me most about, and obviously delighted him for rather esoteric personal reasons, was one that never made it quite to the top of the charts. It was a piece called Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments. He heard a performance which the Group for Contemporary Music did up at McMillin and professed to love it. Now I must confess to you, I think the reason he felt that was because in many ways it was my most difficult piece both to perform and to hear. It was a piece that made many people very angry. It had long, long, long periods of unchanging notes, or very, very slow-changing pitch combinations, which was not like my usual music and which intrigued Stefan. There was another reason, too. It was conducted by Harvey Sollberger, and Harvey and Charles both sort of latched onto that piece. It was then repeated at a large concert at Town Hall, and I remember walking out with Stefan after that, and he expressed this great, great enthusiasm for this piece, which has never been performed since. Now that piece we did go over in enormous detail, for two reasons, the first being the tempo organization. It's not the only piece of mine in which I've done this, but it's the most extreme piece. I decided after that piece that I would have to find some sort of way of writing music that was not as difficult. It was just too much. We also had the problem of the tenor. The tenor in that piece used only phonemes, and the phonemes were indeed chosen in order to either contrast or blend with the instruments. Sometimes it worked very well, and sometimes it didn't. Now that's a piece about which I talked a great deal with Stefan. He wanted to know about phonemic structure. Obviously he knew not a great deal about vocal acoustics and vowel acoustics, and many of us were involved in this, not merely for musical purposes, because we were involved in electronics. He did not know about the Haskins Laboratory in New York. I told him about it. He said he would like to visit it, and he had friends who could get him there.

That is the piece with which I can remember the most discussion about the organization--spatial organization, division of the musical space, as well as musical time, and possible analogies between the two. Stefan was one of those who took quite literally--as almost everybody did, including Stravinsky--a statement that Schoenberg never made, but was alleged to have made, about the identification of the horizontal and the vertical. And Schoenberg said he liked that idea, where Stravinsky said he hated the idea. Stefan said he liked it, but he didn't want to use it too literally, and I remember discussing with him the fact that Schoenberg had never talked about that. He said something much vaguer about the unity of musical space, and this had really nothing very much to do with some notion about whatever goes up may go sideways, or something such as that. It was rather that the whole problem of how to make identifications between that which is defined linearly and that which is defined vertically required all kinds of very specific Schoenbergian techniques. We talked about those a little.

Stefan's Darmstadt lecture [1956] is really a public lecture about a lot of composers. The Yale lecture was not like that at all. The Yale lecture was "How I Write Music." Stefan decided that I'm the academic man, so he called me and asked me if I would look at this lecture. Whether, I thought, first of all, it was long enough. And I said, "Don't pack it too full, because no one will understand." And I said to him, "Look, Stefan, don't speak too quickly, and above all, you'll be able to cover much, much less than you think." Well, he showed me this packet of papers, which at that time was handwritten, and it was a mixture of languages. I mean he would put in German words where he didn't know equivalents. All I can tell you is that I probably saw it two or three times. He was very, very anxious about. He had all kinds of trepidations. He knew that Yale was a prestigious institution, and I think he thought this might get him a job. So he worried and worried. All I can tell you is that he never wrote it out completely. Perhaps a week before he was going up to New Haven I saw it. Al Baumann was constantly helping him, so I guess we did this together. We told him to use many musical examples, to illustrate everything, not to just stand there and describe these techniques. The report was that by the time he came to the end of the first hour people were looking around rather anxiously. By the end of the second hour many people had left. It is reported that it went on for over three hours, when they told him he would have to stop. When I asked him a week or two later how it went, he said he really wasn't satisfied with it, because there were so many things that he had to skip over and skirt through. He said, "You know, people seemed to think that it was too long."

I remember when Claus asked me to come down once to hear Stefan talk about a Bartök string quartet at this new music school somewhere down on Second Avenue around Twelfth. Claus said, "Come on over, Stefan's going to talk about a Bartök quartet," and it was the Fourth. I found it fascinating for a very simple reason. It really came out of a certain kind of tradition of analysis of which none of these kids were aware. It was the tradition of the minor second in the Mozart G Minor Symphony. It was motive-hunting, interval-hunting. But all that Stefan was using the Bartök Fourth Quartet for was a way of showing how he'd gotten some of his ideas and how he'd extrapolated from them. He would show fragmentary things in the Bartök and then show how this could have been developed. It had very little to do with Bartök except as an instigator and as a kind of justifier for the things he was going to talk about.

When Stefan was at a rehearsal, I can tell you with regard to one piece, the piece he wrote for trumpet, saxophone, his jazz piece [Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion, and Piano, 1950]. It was rehearsed at McMillin, and the rehearsal was very interesting. It was probably a dress rehearsal. Stefan was constantly concerned with matters of balance, or being able to hear the relationship between the individual instruments. There was almost no stopping for anything else. Dynamics, a little, but that was dynamics as it contributes to balance. But with that ensemble group the piece did not come off well at all. And I think he was disappointed with the performance. But all that he kept worrying about was the trumpet and the saxophone playing too loudly.

Obviously he was concerned to teach people how music must go to be intelligent, coherent, beautiful, forceful. I forget the adjectives he used to use. These were the necessary and sufficient conditions for making this music, endowing it with those properties. This is obviously when he taught them from the ground up. Stefan was obviously quite different [from Stravinsky and Schoenberg]. He wanted to show people how he wrote music.

Milton Babbitt (b. 1916) studied at New York University where, in 1935 he received his B.A. He studied composition privately with Roger Sessions and subsequently pursued graduate studies at Princeton, where he joined the music faculty in 1938. In 1971 he joined the music faculty at Juilliard and also taught at the Berkshire Music Center. Babbitt was a founding member of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and in 1986 was named a MacArthur fellow. Interview: AC, New York City, 14 December 1983.

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Claude Ballif

I met Wolpe in Darmstadt, where I went from 1956 to 1959. For me Stefan Wolpe was an American, while Var&nbspse ise is French. Wolpe was not at all a German composer, although he had the sense of humor of a Berliner just to have some joy in life. In his music is some humor. What I remember of Wolpe is the man, his music, and his gesture. When he was in Berlin 1956-57, I went to see him every week and showed him my music. He loved to make plays on words, and he called me Pilaf or Piaf. When I visited Wolpe, it was for the whole afternoon or the whole evening. His house was open, there was no limit. For me Wolpe is the world of childhood. He was only truly himself when one saw him alone in his home and he revealed that childlike world. He loved Paul Klee and showed me much about it. For him it was music. About music he spoke always with images, a splendid gift of the image. I never had a technical discussion of his music, but he told me about his system, which I liked very much, and I have examples that he made for me. Not abstract.

Wolpe was wonderful because when he spoke about music he gave the sense, the essential analysis. Josef Rufer invited Wolpe into his class at the Berlin Hochschule, and Wolpe began to speak about fish, so Rufer did not invite Wolpe to give an official lecture at the Hochschule. Rufer was very astonished that I visit Wolpe, and I noticed that he sometimes didn't take Wolpe seriously. I think it's wonderful to speak about fish with music, because for me the most important thing in music is not to have an a, b, and c--a fixed structure, the principal thing is movement. When I think of the man, I have a sense of a sort of mise-en-scène. He sits down to explain some things to me, and he suddenly cuts his discussion, is completely lost, gives me some orange and things to eat, and asks Hilda to bring some cakes to Pilaf. The lesson that I have from Wolpe is that we are not in the world, but we try to be in the world. With our little genius temperament we do just what we can.

Wolpe was the first musician I've met who spoke really like an artist about music. We spoke about Bach and the choice of the voice for some subject, the choice of the color of different instruments for saying different things, and to respect the spirit of the instrument. The idea of the subject of a fugue giving the sense of the whole construction, the importance of the choice of the beginning of the piece. Wolpe considered music like a physical thing. He opened my mind about the idea of register. It was really interesting for me, because before Xenakis Wolpe was very concerned with this idea of register and pitch. He explained to me his idea of taking in the middle a pitch, and after, two, four, five [pitches], and so on, like a tree. For me this great sense of register is Wolpe, and I owe him my own path. This is my tribute to Wolpe.

Wolpe said you must read Busoni's book on new music. He was interested in the structure of the piano music of Busoni. He gave me the good poison of the most important things. I was fascinated by the String Trio of Schoenberg because for the first time Schoenberg put away the idea of serial construction. We discussed the Trio and Wolpe was very interesting about the idea of building the piece around timbre and register. I have a word, scale-harmony, and for each piece we must have a color which is given by the beginning. When you fix the register, you fix also the scale-harmony. Wolpe said, "one should know about all the structures of fantasy and all the fantasies of structure." He is for me the example of freedom of structure and not mathematics, how to bring the human, physical impulse into a real composition, with the brain, with intelligence, and with the ear.

It was really amazing for me when Wolpe said that he was a student of Webern, because his music is completely different. Wolpe said Webern was a very ordinary person, so simple, and never spoke about his music as an example. That was a good lesson. This was completely different from Boulez's idea of Webern. The French people like clear-cut ideas, but you cannot put this music in a little vase. I asked Wolpe what sort of man was Webern. Was he like Boulez, sure of himself, no discussion, mathematical? Wolpe said, on the contrary. He was a marvelous, simple man, not a star. I said to Wolpe, "What is your opinion about the Second Sonata of Boulez?" And he said, "Splendid!" He liked the sense of virtuosity of this Sonata.

In Wolpe's Violin Sonata what interested me was the freedom of the relation between the violin and the piano, the fresh, open feeling in the treatment, and no pretension to do a classical Beethoven violin and piano. It was the goal of Wolpe to give an impression of improvisation. He was not a specialist of jazz, but he has respect for light music, for music of the people. He liked that, but it was not his goal. He did not give a fixed image of himself, he was mysterious, and sometimes happy to be not celebrated. It was his strength, his force, and I thought for me there is really a great American musician, because he is American now.

Wolpe is completely different from Cage. He doesn't play that amusing, "I give this music, but I can give another." Wolpe needs a deep human feeling and requires the exact expression. We spoke about that with Beethoven, and there is a sense of Beethoven about Wolpe. Wolpe was so deeply wounded by memories of the Nazis that he put it away. He was not a man who cultivated the nostalgia of things. A man is great by the feeling of his insufficiency and by the desire to grow up despite his limitations. He was enthusiastic, excited by his environment and by life. It is a great chance to be able to express ourselves and to write music, and he had that. His music is a quest.

Composer and theorist Claude Ballif (b. Paris, 1924) studied at the Conservatories of Bordeaux, Paris, and Berlin. Since 1971 he has been professor of music analysis at the Paris Conservatoire and since 1982 associate professor of composition. Interview: AC, Paris, 31 May 1985.

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Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg

As I understand it, at some point [Leonard] Bernstein spoke to Wolpe and said that the Symphony clearly ought to be done, explained the inherent problem, then asked Wolpe if he would consent to have the Symphony re-notated. Now, it should be made very clear that the re-notation was supposed to be simply a facilitation. After all, the score is nothing that the listener directly hears. The score yields parts which stand in front of the orchestra players. It lies in front of the conductor who conducts it. But it is clearly possible to notate a composition in several different ways and still have it come out sounding the same. It was not to be the kind of job that Rimsky-Korsakov did on Musorgsky, straightening out clashing harmonies and things of that kind. As I understand it, and again this all predates my time with Wolpe, Wolpe was intensely suspicious of Bernstein and at first said no, he could not possibly work the piece over. But Bernstein was persistent and asked him, "Suppose we get you a collaborator?" And then Wolpe began to show certain signs of interest--again this is all hearsay from the Bernstein circle. When Bernstein mentioned the idea of a collaborator, Wolpe very cautiously said, "Well, whom do you suggest?" And then Bernstein began to think, and said, "It has to be someone who should know what is conductable, and it should also be somebody who could do the necessary calculations, to do the arithmetic transformations of note values necessary." And no sooner had these two requirements entered his head than he said, "Of course this means that it should be Stefan Mengelberg." Whereupon Wolpe said, "Who is Stefan Mengelberg?" And Bernstein said, "Supposing we send him to you and you can talk things over and see if you might wish to enter on this project." Wolpe said, "Fine." And through the Bernsteinian grapevine I was then told that there was a certain interest in getting this job done and would I be interested in doing it. It thought it was a fascinating idea, but I must report that an awful lot of people with whom I discussed it informally told me that I was completely crazy to consider it. They said, Wolpe will throw inkwells at you, and generally that he would be a terrible man to work with. He has an awful temper, and since you will be viewed as somebody who is basically tampering with or bowdlerizing his work, you will be behind the eight-ball from the beginnings. [. . .]

In those days the Wolpes were still living on 70th Street in a brownstone walkup. I remember going there. There was a long hallway that one walked to get to the Wolpe apartment front door. I remember being on that landing and seeing Wolpe standing there at the door, maybe twenty or thirty feet away, and I, my heart pounding. I didn't really know would I ever get out of there alive. And he was standing in the door as I came towards him, and said, "Here comes my savior." God, I was bowled over. I had expected at best being tolerated. So without another word, he leads me straight from the apartment door to the drafting table on which he worked. And there was the Symphony opened to the first page of the first movement. [. . .]

We went to the drafting table, and Wolpe said, "There it is." And I said, "Yes." And then, "What would you do about the first measure." No chit-chat, no small talk, straight from the bell. What would you do? So I told him what I would do about the first measure, and he said, "Go ahead." Which again seemed to me very strange, coming from the man who was going to throw inkwells at me. "And now, what would you do about the second measure?" So I told him what I would do about the second measure, and he said, "Out of the question!" I thought, now we have reached the point of resistance. However, he really objected to that specific solution, and he was not at all adamant or difficult to work with. And before I knew it, we had gone through the first, I would say, fifteen pages of that score and had come to the basic decisions about how to deal with it. So, two or three hours later we arrive at that point. and then I simply could not get myself to say, "Mr. Wolpe, I really came here to tell you that I cannot work with you until the fall." The moment for that would have been shortly after I walked in the door. So we scheduled appointment after appointment after appointment. No waiting until fall. And in that spring, to the best of my recollection, we had 22 or 23 sessions, each one of several hours, in which we discussed basically the re-notation of the Symphony. Bernstein funded this. I was paid $50 a session, and the figure of $650 sticks in my mind. So I think they paid for thirteen sessions, and I threw in the other nine.

Our agreements were memorialized in the form of instructions to a copyist. I did not actually re-bar the Symphony. I said to the copyist something such as, "Change this 5/32 bar into a 1/4 bar. Take one 32nd note into the next measure. Change certain accents. Change certain beams. perhaps make a quintuplet out of ---." As I recall we wrote all of this on yellow legal-size sheets. The copyist was doing that work while we were still re-barring. It may have gone to the copyist when we were through with a movement. And the copyist then executed these instructions, in part working on the original transparencies, in part, when things got very bad, perhaps cutting out a measure and pasting another strip in, and things of that kind. And that was the spring of 1962.

My own ideas on his notation underwent a very drastic change in the first three or four afternoons that I worked with him. At first, when I saw the score, I thought this is all unnecessarily complex, not in the sense that somebody is simply writing something which is unnecessarily hard to execute, but that somebody's writing something which is more complex than his own creative processes would mandate regardless of execution difficulties. Complication which had no justification in terms of his own hearing of these things. And I could understand that somebody hears things in a very complex way but is oblivious to problems of execution difficulty. I thought it was so to speak somewhat artificially complex. And it became very clear to me within three or four sessions of working with him that this was absolutely not the case. I mean, Wolpe thought in these terms and heard these things this way. I remember once we had an argument about a sustained note, a note which was held through let us say a 7/4 measure, followed by a 5/32 measure, followed by a 9/16 , followed by a 2/4 measure with a fermata on the second quarter so there was no pulse. And I simply could not understand why anybody would do that when simple a fermata with the word lunga might have done equally as well. And when I asked him, and by the way we very quickly fell into speaking German, "Ja, wer hört das denn?" He raised his finger and said, "Das hört Gott." And it was only semi-exaggerated and semi-facetious. What he meant is he heard it, not that he referred to himself as God, but these things were real to him. And consequently one had to be somewhat, I don't want to say deferential, but deferring to these notions of his. I think that kind of realization caused me perhaps to perform surgery which was more minimal than would have been if I had felt that much of this was simply empty artifice.

The same realization came to me when he simply spoke about his music. He had such a metaphorical way, and I'm tempted to say, metaphysical way of speaking about his music. As you probably know, I come out of a rather anti-metaphysical tradition, empiricism, logical positivism. I'm always inherently deeply suspicious of these things, and I wondered whether this was not all rather hyperinflated and empty verbiage. But it is very clear that these were the terms in which he actually thought. There was absolutely nothing phony about him. And while I would still say that this is not really my style, I felt that it had to be respected. There developed between us a very great personal fondness. He would often say, "Wie schön dass ich jemand Stefan nennen kann." [How nice that I can call someone else Stefan.] And then he would always refer to me as Stefan der Zweite [Stefan the Second], as if it were written in Roman numerals, like one emperor following another. And I think he had really very paternal feelings towards me.

The actual new score was probably all finished from the point of view of the copyist by early fall. At that point it was resubmitted to Bernstein, who, and I think this is a direct quote from him, said, it was immensely improved from the point of view of performability, and he decided then to schedule it with the Philharmonic for the '63-'64 season. He scheduled six weeks or so devoted almost principally to contemporary music. At some point in late '62 or early '63 Bernstein asked me whether now that I probably knew the Symphony and its present score more than anyone else, would I want to conduct it. And that of course is an offer which is extremely difficult to refuse. I would say in early 1963 I agreed to conduct those performances [. . .] Bernstein came over, and we began to have discussions, and at that point the idea was first raised that perhaps we would not try to play the whole Symphony. I think it was Bernstein, because I would not have suggested it. Quite apart from the admission of dropping the last movement, there was the question of how to allocate time to the other movements. Bernstein came to me and said, "You know, Wolpe is prepared to let the first movement be played as you have it now. So that you could spend essentially all your time on the second movement." I said, "Well, I'm not prepared to have the first movement played as it is now." Little by little these things were adjusted, and finally the decision was made. We did read through the third movement on the first day. We did it slightly under tempo, which was fiendishly difficult to conduct. All the same, there were some shouts of bravo as we got through. That last movement is a marvelous movement. Stefan used to say that it had to be played like Haydn, sort of joyous, open, bouncy.

Finally the decision was made to go for movements one and two, which of course reduced somewhat rehearsal time pressure. Bernstein's behavior in the whole things was absolutely magnificent, and he was very much maligned afterwards in an article in the Boston Globe. He not only began to take direct and immediate personal interest in the whole proceedings, but on Thursday, having had very little rehearsal time now himself, he kept giving me his rehearsal time. In fact, Thursday morning at the dress rehearsal, of which I was to have the first half and he the second, as I was going to leave, he said, "Stick around. I'm going to cut the Beethoven short, and I want you to go through the Symphony again at the end of the dress rehearsal. Just play it as if it were the concert." Leonard Bernstein can be as difficult as anybody under the sun, but in that week I really think he rose to very considerable heights.

In those days, he was still, at least on Thursday nights, speaking to the audience about the music. But during the contemporary music cycle he did that all four days, because he thought it was important. The personality of Bernstein served to defuse a certain amount of audience hostility, and his comments could be viewed essentially as a plea to the audience at least to give these pieces a fair hearing. On Wednesday morning he handed me a folder and said, "These are the remarks that I intend to make tomorrow about the Wolpe Symphony. I want you to go over them and check them with Wolpe to see if there's anything in these remarks that either you or he would tend to object to, because then I'll make the necessary adjustments." Basically he spoke simply of the difficult birth that the Symphony was having from the Rodgers and Hammerstein commission on to the present, and the crisis of the Symphony which was not rehearsable and crisis of the parts which were not playable. And then the fact that on Tuesday morning the rehearsals had turned out to be much more difficult. At the rehearsals Wolpe was not an active participant. He told me that he could not be. He said, "Please do not come and ask me about balances and so on. I simply cannot do that." He sat there debilitated by the illness. I did check with him the remarks, and we both agreed that there was nothing reprehensible.

He was one of the most intensely vibrant of human beings, really volcanic in his energy, with those wicked eyebrows always much in action. He was also given to making occasionally wicked remarks. I once asked him in general about how he saw his own music fitting into what you might call the great tradition, by which I mean basically the notions which until very recently have governed our view of art in civilization, which is to say as a way of communication from human being to human being. Essentially the question was, "Do you intend by means of your music to stir the passions of human beings?" He said, "Oh, no, for that I use something quite different." That's an absolute marvelous Wolpeism.

Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, a mathematician for IBM, also served as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic (under Bernstein) and music director of the St. Louis Philharmonic. His expertise in both areas enabled him to devise a musical notation system for computers. President of Mannes College of Music from 1966-69, Bauer-Mengelberg subsequently practiced as a lawyer in New York City and Long Island. He passed away suddenly in 1996. Interview: AC, New York City, 6 December 1984.

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Bernard Benoliel

I heard some pieces by Wolpe and thought they were exceptionally interesting. There was a symposium magazine published about who was who in contemporary music in the U.S., and I looked through the biographies. I took one look at Wolpe's and saw he had studied with Busoni, and I thought that's the man for me. So I wrote to him and told him a little about myself and what I wanted to do. I got a letter about six or eight weeks later--he had been away for the summer. It was 1968. He asked me to ring him. When I did, he said, "Come down and say hello." The voice was quite faint.

When I arrived at his flat, he came to the door himself. He was wearing some crumpled, khaki-colored trousers, a shirt of similar color, partially covered by a greyish-brown sweater. By then he was hollow-cheeked, slightly bent in appearance, and looked very fragile. He invited me in, shuffling along unsteadily into his studio room, where we sat down at his piano. I brought him a batch of my early music and a choral work which I had just finished, Eternity-Junctions, First Sequence. I was very lucky that in the nearly two years I spent with him he was very compos mentis most of the time, and the lively mind, which obviously I didn't know before he had Parkinson's, was always very much in evidence. He just looked and looked at the same passage, back and forth over three pages, the kind of thing he always did at my lessons. Then he said to me, "What do you want here? What do you want to learn? What are you looking for? I think I was a bit downtrodden after being in New York a few years and not doing very much of anything. I thought perhaps I needed more traditional stuff. He said to me, "You're already a very erudite composer. You don't need that. If you want to go back and do that kind of thing on your own later for analysis, that's fine. That's not what you need now." I realized later this was very high praise from him. Then he proposed the question again, "What kind of music do you want to write?" I told him, "Well, frankly, at this point I don't know. That (Eternity-Junctions) is the closest I can get to what I would like to do. But I feel it's very limited, and it won't really lead anywhere." He tended to agree with this and said with great sincerity and quiet emotion, "I will tell you what I know. I think you will learn quickly." From then on I had a lesson once a week for about eighteen months, and we became quite friendly. I was very much grafted onto his European circle, now a vanished world. I sometimes saw him socially two or three times a week. I would take him to concerts, sometimes to the hospital, at other times if he was going to see a friend and he needed someone to help him. As we walked, I used to half-sing tunes from the Bruckner and Mahler symphonies. We used them as a kind of rhythmic pulse. He entered into the swing and then he could walk much better.

About Busoni, he said, "I saw Busoni six times for composition lessons over a period of a year and a half." And he added, "I remember every word." That's the quote that sticks in my mind. Another time he mentioned to me how important the aesthetics of composition were to Busoni. One hears Busoni's fingerprints on so many of his pieces from the 1920s and 1930s. What I was getting was a composite of his own thinking and Busoni's, and no doubt other great minds he came into contact with. Any great teacher is like that--which he certainly was. When I attended the 1968 Bennington Composer's Conference, Mario Davidovsky, after hearing my Variations, said to me, "Yes, the thing about Wolpe is that he prepares the slate, he gives you what you need, but he leaves your own personality to write on the slate." In other words, another personality could learn from Stefan without sounding like him.

Stefan loved to use vocabulary from other disciplines, the jargon of contemporary painters and imagery borrowed from chemistry. He talked about amalgams, crystallization, and the compound makeup of certain liquids. He was a great one for using different levels of language within a composition, creating a juxtaposition of complex and simple situations. He said to me, although this is not a quote, if you're going to compose a composition from only one or two viewpoints, the piece is going to suffer terribly from being one-sided. He said, "You have to work against yourself." He meant you just don't do the things that you like, but you must also do things that you don't like to do in order to make a composition richer. That is one of the most important things I learned from him.

I was very pleased that he liked my work as much as he did. He would make criticisms, but he seemed to feel that I knew what I was doing, what I was going for. But sometimes he would say, "Well, you'd better lighten this up a bit." And then we'd have our jokes, because he knew that I was a passionate Brucknerian and loved Pfitzner's Palestrina. He would laugh. He also told me no one had mentioned Schmidt and Pfitzner to him since he had left Germany. He liked the Bruckner adagios very much, but not the works as a whole. I don't think he admired Mahler unreservedly either. Mahler stood for something important because he used to say that the opening of the Seventh Symphony was a tune that he and his cohorts used to whistle when he was studying in Berlin--a kind of signal.

His comments at lessons were usually very cryptic. I know he was different with different pupils who had different talents and different weaknesses. With me, when not actually teaching his concepts and techniques, he was very monosyllabic. But sometimes: "The rest of it is fine, but in those two bars I think the texture could be a bit more elaborate." Another time he pointed to a passage and said, "I think maybe a little traditional counterpoint here." He didn't like music that was thin in ideas. He was concerned that something was always happening. Did every note have a purpose. Was the organism healthy in the way it was functioning. Once he sat for twenty minutes looking at a phrase from my Variations. I remember the spot. He said absolutely nothing. I was waiting for the big pronouncement, but didn't get it. At a later lesson he was worried a little about the lengths of the variations in relationship to each other, and to be careful if I was going to use different lengths I make sure that the pattern added up to something. About a passage in another piece on which I was working he said, "Is this meant to be an organ piece?" I said, "No." "Well, what I think you have done here is written something where the tessituras are being kept too much at the same level." Actually I was thinking about passages you sometimes find in Var&quotse, se, Bruckner, and even Schubert. I don't think he liked anything too slow moving or static.

Returning to my first lesson with him, we worked with serial procedures. I showed him several scores I had written much earlier, which I considered to be bad. He said, "Well, yes, they are not good pieces." He realized there had been a lot of development since. He looked over a very early string quartet and said, "You look like you were doing everything you could not to write a serial piece." This was very astute, because it was the literal truth. Regarding serialism he said, "You have to learn it, you have to learn the complexities. Do your row transpositions. I no longer use them, I only work with a group of five or six pitches at a time." He brought out his Trio and said with a smile something to the effect that it was one of his most conservative pieces. When he made that kind of statement, it was always ironic and layered with other meanings. Another time he commented, "I'm not against traditional counterpoint," again with more than a touch of irony. About the composing process, "one has to give up certain things," the inference being, if you give up something there's the possibility of something else taking its place. He believed that a composition should be controlled by a protocol, but that too much pre-planning could destroy the natural form suggested by the original group of pitches the composer chose to work with.

We were talking about how much great music did this or that composer produce. I said, "For me there's nothing that compares with late Beethoven from Opus 101 onwards." "Yes," he said, "the sonatas and quartets, these pieces are miracles." I think he admired Tristan very much. He would always answer a question. I never asked him to expand on his comments. If it was monosyllabic, I knew that is all he wanted to say. In my second or third lesson he asked me to do an exercise for instrumental ensemble. I chose a double trio, three strings and three winds. He read through it at the piano. At one point he said, "Ah, it's Wagner, but good Wagner--Siegfried--very youthful." "What do you think of Wagner," I asked. Once again he expressed his admiration for Tristan. He also told me he found some of the harmony of The Ring very interesting. We discussed Schoenberg, and I was guarded, and very guarded about Webern. We were working on my Variations. Between lessons I decided to add a solo soprano. With a look of surprise he said, "You've turned it into a cantata. Well then, one piece you should look at is the Schoenberg Serenade." He wanted me to see the relationship between the vocal parts and the ensemble. He did not suggest going through the score with me. For him it was enough to give me the hint. He asked me what I thought of Webern. I answered, "For me it's just impossible, I just can't relate to his music at all." After that he never mentioned him. He was very sensitive to the likes and dislikes of other people. He had a very subtle mind. He could teach Webern without mentioning him. It was not the Webern aspect of his background that attracted me, yet it was this aspect which probably liberated me most of all, for it was the world of pitch relationships that he taught me more than anything else.

He first discussed pitch relationships in terms of serial procedure. He was a firm believer in keeping certain pitches back, not using the whole series. He also believed in using different transpositions for different types of music and different kinds of musical events--back again to different levels of language. The first thing he asked me to write was a piece for piano on four pitches only. He particularly wanted people to hear what they were actually writing, which is not the simple matter it might seem. In the little piano piece I used octaves towards the end. Looking at them he said, "Don't use octaves, it's false power." So I asked "Well, what about Bartök?" There was a long, long pause. He was obviously very loath to say anything. For once I pressed the point, "Well, do you like any of his pieces? I am particularly fond of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta." He replied, "That's his best work, that's a good piece." End of subject. A few lessons later, he said, "You are learning very quickly, you are getting to the root of my ideas, but I don't want to overwhelm you either." He was concerned that I had time to assimilate everything. I wrote the first version of my String Quartet at the same time as he wrote his long delayed one for the Juilliard Quartet. He told me he was having trouble with the beginning of the second movement. I think he was concerned about setting the right mood. After spending a good deal of time looking over a passage of my quartet, he would often make no comment. I came to understand this meant it was all right, because he was not remotely shy about making a definite criticism. If he came to the conclusion you knew what you were doing and why, he felt there was nothing to say. If he was unsure, he would say, "Well, why have you done that?" Of course, I always knew why, which made him smile. I took his teaching and my music very seriously. He appreciated sincerity and had an attitude of reverence towards high ideals.

About From Here on Farther he considered it a kind of scherzo. When we attended the first performance, he smiled and said, "It's just a little piece." I feel it had a special significance for him because his humor crossed over from the ironic to the wistful. Before he began Form IV he said, "I want to do a group of piano pieces." After he had finished it he said with a very wide smile, "It's my last Beethoven sonata."

His humor was always in evidence. He loved the Marx Brothers and never tired of Harpo's antics. I think for Stefan there was a touch of Don Quixote in this man, and he identified with him. I used to come for my lessons on Thursdays. One week this was going to be difficult, and I suggested another day. He said, "Oh no, not on. . . that's the day I teach the idiots." There was no malice, just a tacit acceptance expressed with genuine good humor. He wore a similar expression when he mentioned that he lived with his third wife, while his second lived upstairs. The immortal child, naughty and wonder-struck was very strong in him. He was reticent to give opinions about colleagues or their music, but when he was asked at the New York premiere of Stockhausen's Hymnen what he thought of it, he said, "I like the tunes best." After a premiere by one ex-pupil he grinned and whispered, "He sometimes composes my music better than I do." I once mentioned liking Scriabin, he was surprised and said with a twinkle in his eye, "I am a better composer than Scriabin." On another occasion I said that I thought his place in music history was assured. He answered, "What, little Wolpe."

I related to Stefan in three different ways--as a very important composer, a great and revered teacher, and, for too short a time, a personal friend. I admire Stefan's early music more than I love it. When you listen to a piece like the Oboe Sonata you can understand why he later developed the way he did. It is the music from the last decade that I like the most. I think it is epoch-making in its own subtle way. Sometimes I find his music a little cool, but I always succumb to the mercurial intelligence and masterly technique. I feel his music will really be understood when his potential audiences can hear almost as fast as his mind moved. What he achieved in his late pieces was to become free of the late romantic sound world with its grandiose gestures without abdicating the traditional techniques on which it was based. He was a great teacher and certainly the perfect teacher for me. Without his ideas, I don't think I would have taken the broad jump I needed to become myself as a composer. He taught me to see so many possibilities, and I know for him that is what it was all about.

Bernard Benoliel (b. 1938) was educated in the United States, won a Bennington Composers Award in 1969 and a Tanglewood Fellowship in 1970. He moved to England the following year, where he divides his time between composing and his position as administrator of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust. Interview: AC, London 11 June 1985, revised for publication, 1998.

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Elmer Bernstein

No individual had a more profound impact on my life and music than Stefan Wolpe. As a matter of fact he also had an impact on certain culinary matters. I will never forget going to his apartment for a lesson and watching him put lemon rinds into coffee. Young Americans in those days (early 1940s) knew nothing of such coffee refinements as espresso.

Wolpe pushed very hard to expand one's musical horizons, and as a student you were "liberated" from some academic concepts when you backslid into conventional mediocrity. He would cry out, "What do you want to be--a Leoncavallo?" I must say that as my music was "freed up" my piano compositions became more and more complex, and I would find myself going to lessons when I found it impossible to play what I had written, it being too technically difficult. Not so for Wolpe, who could sight-read almost anything I could write, which was among his many startling talents. I learned a great deal from him about rhythmic intensity and how to achieve it. With all his forward-looking compositional techniques one never lost respect for the past. When I was married in 1942, his wedding gift to me was a bound score of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand.

We spent a summer together at Port Clyde, Maine, during which time, between picnics, he analyzed Bach preludes and fugues and Mozart sonatas. Although it is daunting to see and understand the works of genius, it still illuminated "the way." I remember contentious evenings of modern music when Wolpe would spar with adversaries. I remember one particular evening which got overheated, and Wolpe accused one of his adversaries of having no sense of counterpoint. When the victim remonstrated, analyzing his work to illustrate the counterpoint, Wolpe characterized the counterpoint as "a syphilitic dog swimming in stagnant water." He projected a great vision with overpowering energy and humor.

Actually his tastes in music were especially catholic, and this quality is demonstrated by the great variety of students he taught. Some were in the big band and jazz world, in the film music world, and the concert hall. He was a superb teacher and a great energizer.

Pianist, composer, and conductor Elmer Bernstein (b. 1922) was educated at New York University. Mr. Bernstein is the past president of the Young Musicians Foundation and currently is president of the Film Music Society, which is devoted to the preservation of film music. He has composed scores for television and documentary shows as well as more than 200 major films. Written communication, Santa Monica, CA, 11 December 1998.

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Yohanan Boehm

Before Hitler I was active in so-called "saving the world through Communism." All these Jewish intellectuals were busy at that time thinking that that was the salvation of the world. As a pianist I was active in the agitprop troupe in Breslau. I didn't know Wolpe himself, but I knew all sorts of his songs, which I learned by heart by playing so many times for all different kinds of political assemblies. Then for a year I was playing French horn in the symphony orchestra in Frankfurt with William Steinberg. And when I came here in '36 I was sitting in the hall and playing the piano. I had nothing to do, because the Palestine Conservatoire of Music, which gave me the certificate, was more or less a name. So I was sitting there and playing for myself all these tunes I remembered rather nostalgically. And suddenly the door opened with a big bang, and in comes a wild man. "Who is playing my music? That's my music, that's my music!" I said, "It's me, but I didn't know it's your music." And then of course we became friends, because that was a link.

I studied with him a little bit conducting. He had only a course with Hermann Scherchen, but he had elbow technique. He did really what Scherchen [said] in his Handbook of Conducting. Not a normal conductor. Of course, we didn't have an orchestra, we didn't even have a record player, so the whole thing was very theoretical. We did the Haydn Symphony in C minor, and in order to give us the musical mind, he used to put in words: "Wie sch&nbspn isn ist, wie schön ist wenn Wolpe dirigiert." He would have made a good conductor for certain things, because he had a fantastic ear and was very precise. [. . .]

You see, Stefan wasn't bourgeois enough to be administratively acceptable. He couldn't if he wanted to be. He would have blown up the thing within no time. Nobody could really then keep up with his tempo and with this tension he used to work. He was a terribly impractical man, and that's a good thing about it, just for the worker's choir. [. . .] Stefan never tried to be an Israeli at that time because of his political background. His outlook was about twenty years ahead of his time here.

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Franz Boensch

I grew up in Vienna and came to Berlin in 1929. I worked with Erwin Piscator. I was reciting at that time, and I said I want to work with Wolpe on music. I had never learned singing, and he said, "You don't know a thing." I first worked with Wolpe as a couple [duo]. There were many couples [like] the famous Eisler-Busch who worked there. At Liebknechthaus we worked in certain meetings. I stood in front, and he stood seven meters behind me. He was so fanatic in music, and he never listened to what I said. He was [snorting]. Sometimes I had to break up and say, "Pa§ auf [shut up] Stefan, you must a bit listen to me too!" He was no accompanist. He even composed everything which was already composed, always changing. We were a funny couple. We did this for about a year from one meeting to another. Once, sometimes twice a week at political meetings. There were speakers at the meetings, I remember Arthur Pieck, Heinz Neumann. I think it was quite a success. Very good reception always. The people were much impressed by his kind of bravura on the piano, because workers had not much connection with this music. They valued that, they saw how he worked. It was a kind of storm of sounds that impressed them. That is their workers' experience. Their experience is hard work, you have to be quick in work, and something come out. And that was always with Wolpe too.

At that time it was still Stalinism. And once I was with him in a train, and he said, "You know, I am writing abstract music and the Party doesn't understand it." It wasn't abstract music, it was quite unusual music, but of course the workers were very interested.

We rehearsed in his studio in Dahlem. This woman had a cellar and in one [room] was a piano. And there we rehearsed. It lasted until we started the Rote Revue, and out of the Rote Revue followed the Truppe 1931. Wolpe wrote the music, about ten pieces, for the Rote Revue for choir. We played it on the First of May [1931], then we repeated it. The text was created mainly by [Felix] Gasbarra, the first dramaturge of Piscator, and the producer was the famous regisseur [Leopold] Lindtberg. The choir was [those who became] Truppe 1931. And this was very successful, and then somebody said why don't we stay together and get to run a theater. We played for Reinhardt, and Reinhardt is a quite different type of regisseur, and he said, "Ah, that's one of those documentary plays." We thought we may play there, which was quite stupid, because it was absolute opposing. And then we found a theater that Reinhardt recommended, Kleines Theater Unter den Linden. Reinhardt started there with the [cabaret] Schall und Rauch. The Theater is for 200 people, but not more. And then we started the Mausefalle. I didn't have work from the Red Revue to the Mausefalle, which was more than three-quarters of a year. We had no money, not a mark.

There was a myth going around, organized by us, that for the first time professional actors play agitprop, and for the first time a collective of people is writing a play. But not one of us wrote. All the writing was by Wangenheim. But it was just to mobilize people, for at that time b&nbsprgerrgerlich, also non-proletarian, people never saw agitprop. It was a sensation for the people. And there were quite a lot of songs of Wolpe.

We rehearsed nearly three-quarters of a year. The play was always changed, and Wolpe changed too the music. We played it first for the Party, and then we went to the Café König, a big restaurant-café at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstra§e. And in the cellar we had a very big room. The play was based partly on the Bata Shoe [Company]. And the biggest shoe producer of Germany was Leiser. And we asked people from Leiser, and about 150 people came and we played for them and asked, "What is your opinion?" And they said no and yes, and Wangenheim rewrote the play again. So we had big agreement already with a lot of views. Once the curtain went up and we saw in the first row Krupp and Thyssen, friends of Hitler, who were in Berlin and wanted to see the anti-capitalistic play, how looks revolution. The pay depended on how many people in the evening came to listen.

Wolpe was an extremely nice chap. He looked a bit fragile, a bit thin, but full of energy. I always wondered that in this small, fragile body were such a power. He mixed in [political] discussions, but you had always the feeling that is not his job. He had a definite opinion about the political aim, but everything else went in and out. A good sense of humor, ja, not too much. He had this ability to listen to other people. I think the whole Communists did not listen to other people. Couldn't listen. Rather talk. He gave his whole life to composing. I don't think he was very much in political meetings, but he was connected with people, and we had discussions, we had arguments about the main things. And in a lot of main things he was as stupid as I was, and as others were. We found out much later. But I am still a Communist. He read carefully the paper, we talked about it, but he was no fanatic. He was fanatic in music, because he was so intensive. He had a center, and the center was music. I had a center in the Party.

Wolpe and Eisler had to do with each other, because it was the same Party, and sometimes they met, but not much. They had quite a different kind of music. Eisler is a Schoenberg students, but he wrote quite new kind of worker songs, Kampflieder. Eisler was in the inner circle of the Party, and whenever some play was performed, he wrote the music. He was much more known, because he was always there. Wolpe was for the Party, but not in the Party. In is being a member. He was very much impressed by Marx. I don't think he read Hegel, and Engels he always cited, talking about the historical parts, the origin of the family.

Franz Boensch (1907-1986), born in Vienna, was an actor and author. For a time he was a member of the agitprop troupe Sturmtrupp Alarm. He was a member of Truppe 1931. He was imprisoned for Communist activities and emigrated to London in 1937. After the war he returned to Vienna. Interview: AC, Vienna, December 30, 1983.

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Herbert Brün

Whether you met him in his home, or in a cafe, or talking about music or about food, or about marriage, or about taking another apartment, it was always the same person. You could not find Wolpe not hollering. He was singing consistently with a more or less sophisticated voice. It depended on the content sometimes, but it never depended on the content whether he would sing or not.

The way he composed was quite unique in the following respect. I met in the mean time other composers, among them composers I respect very much, and the difference between all of those and Wolpe that I remember most clearly is the way they spoke about their working. When Wolpe said he worked, it was always in the past. He didn't say, "I'm now going to work," but he reported to you "last night I really worked." The others speak about plans, problems they have, sometimes interestingly, always long and eloquently. Wolpe in this respect was rather strange. He could speak about a subject infinitely long and with great enthusiasm, and when it came to the point that he composed a piece, he was brief--not uncheerful, with a bit of cheer--he just reported, "I worked." And then he turned around and changed the subject. So any kind of witness-ship to his particular sequence or priorities while composing a piece is not known to me. I claim it cannot have been known to people at that time. I do not know how he spoke later in New York. Suddenly one day he said, "Here's a piece." And then there was one. Also I found him rarely flaunting pieces, showing them. There were some works. Everybody knew about his sensitivity, about him wanting them performed. It was undeniable. But it never came out in sentences out of his mouth. It was indirect. "You should get Stefan some performances," and "Who can we interest?" The futility of these attempts was one part, of course, of my history in Israel, in Palestine at that time. For him it was bitter. [. . .]

He analyzed Brahms, he analyzed Beethoven. He defended the Brahms First Piano Concerto against all verdicts of all critics of all times. He considered that one of Brahms's great pieces, and that it was slandered and libeled by the connoisseurs and the specialists. But that he did not prove by analysis. The Brahms Handel Variations, that was a real assignment he gave. Then he analyzed Schoenberg piano pieces, all of them, Opus 23, every one, depending on the maturity of the student. He made this judgment, and also Irma was then consulted. He preferred to analyze pieces that the people can play. Then if they can't play, he allowed that they couple with somebody who can play. I could play, so I had a nice Wolpe introduction to all the piano music, including the Suite, opus 25, and even the piano part to Pierrot Lunaire, which he liked very much.

He had a strange way to speak to us. He would not put any one really down. I suspected that he was far more in love with Schoenberg than with Stravinsky, yet he didn't want any one of us to think lowly of Stravinsky, because he admired the skill of this man tremendously and got turned off only when Stravinsky got popular, which happened at that time with the Petrouchka. I don't recollect any critical remark; I heard more about Schoenberg from him than about Stravinsky. L'Histoire du Soldat was his exception. I think there that he could get a bit warmed up.

He loved pictures, and he and de Kooning were friends, and some others. I mean he had always painters. He talked about Klee, and he made great friends in Palestine with the painters. And he always had paintings hanging all over the place. And one gave him paintings because he knew what he saw, and he knew to say it. So painters were simply eager. And he taught us, too, in his funny way, when he didn't mean to, sort of by delegate, to watch them, and to see them, and to look more carefully. Touch. Touch with the eyes, touch with the ears, touch with the fingers. Everything's touch.

Constructivism was not wanted. So many needs are not satisfied that this was one more. If people don't want what they need, it's very difficult to talk with them. And he, ja, it was needed. It's remained needed. Cage also was no competition for them, he was so the other side. Whereas Wolpe still was belonging to, he was another composer, right? And Nono and Var&nbspse wse were considered, and Stockhausen and Kagel, and there comes Wolpe. Who needs another competition? There I'm a little malicious, but I'm afraid I'm not off.

I remember certain behaviors of his, and the tone of voice, and saying that definitely make it clear to me that he was also warning us of provincialism. He wanted us to have a view at the small detail in the music which we were to analyze (which he showed us, or which he allowed us to show him) to be so minuscule, so minutely pedantic, in order to not be provincial, since in his view provincialism consisted in categories with a lid on. That when people knew everything already, "Oh, well, yes, that's that." Now these cliches are still with us today. Nothing has changed. We always live in an environment that, with more or less affection, tries to calm us down. And the ruling word is down. Not to calm us up, which would be almost an encouragement, but calm us down. And that he couldn't stand. Wolpe was probably the first person I met where I learned that the words, "Oh, don't worry," are an insult.

Wolpe was a master of the implosion. What he succeeded in doing is to submerge what is prominent. The surface remains steady, the peaks form underneath. It is a wonderful entailment of rebounding from the highest and lowest toward a dramatic middle. The peaks show their profile out of the middle. So anybody who hears the music linearly, and only this way, gets tired after a while and thinks it's always the same. They hear only an average timbre. The moment you become analytic and think, "What's happening inside?" everything is exploding, you are full of stuff. That's the way it's got to be played, too. You must have no false dramatization of a plot nature. It has to always be played as if it would stop in a second and is only going on because of a hiccup. This is my description of the attitude you have to have when you want to have a piece in the Wolpe way. [. . .]

Wolpe spoke with us in German, because most of us were Germans. When he looked at a score, he said, "It's a marvelous idea," or, "You're doing fine." He might say loudly "You're doing fine" as a trumpet, fortissimo. He walked around, and then he picked it up again, picked up the paper and looked at it again, and he said, "Well, what here? Aha, ha, ha!" Then again the next page, "Aha, ha ha! Well? Now look!" And then came the word in some context or another, "Mittlere Zustand der Extase," which is, "mean-average state of ecstasy." This was a devastating criticism on his part, and it teaches two things. No matter who you are and what composer you would like to be, with his approval or not with his approval, you cannot serve your goals if you state only them, if you do not nest them in something. Now the word 'nest' is mine. I insist on it. I am very proud of that word, and I've used it in some other contexts. His idea was that you have to not only state what you want, but also that to which it is to be the answer. So you have to compose an analogue to a fictitious reality which gives rise to your idea, which has provoked you, and that which has provoked you must also somewhere be stated. You cannot just sit there and make your statement with the highest voice and a continuous, allegedly persuasive, but really dictatorial, imposing way. He was opposed to any kind of average, mean-average state, particularly the mean-average state of ecstasy. That was his bogus, he reacted to that violently, and sent people home because he doesn't want to look at it any more. It took a while to understand that, as you can imagine. He was never a great pedagogue. That was not the thing. The thing was still a mixture of the old tradition of the master and the political agent. He wanted to do both. On the one hand, he wanted to tell you how to do things, on the other hand, he didn't want to tell you what to do. He told you how to do what you want--that was the political side--and the other side was the master side. This all became totally awake suddenly. The relevance to our times is mine of course, since Wolpe is not around, and I don't have the opportunity to discuss it with him.

With Wolpe the situation was this. He understood, and taught, and in some way conveyed (is probably a better word) that dialectics are not only a method of philosophy, and thinking, and logic, and discussion, and argument, but are also a description of dramaturgical behavior. The good drama in the hands of a dramaturge, that is, a person who knows about sequence, reference, and durations--this is indispensable and has to be regarded as a sine qua non, as an indispensable condition to bring forth any thought whatsoever. After that you're free to do your thing. Do your thing so that it show itself in the profile that it deserves.

When I was still of a tender age, he gave me this suspicious look. He taught me how to not believe. I give him the credit for it, because I don't remember anybody else who could have done it. He elicited it from me; so if I want to be the counter-music, I must not believe anything, nor believe in anything. So these are the two points I wanted to make: Wolpe's concept of provinciality without using the word, and his concept of mean-average state, particularly that of ecstasy. He understood that every person who wants to break a barrier is an avant gardist. Even though they don't call themselves that, they're always called so by somebody else. Whoever is an anarchist, or is a revolutionary, or is a rebellious person, or just doesn't want any of it any more but that--no matter--in order to have the strength to do that in a hostile environment, they'll probably get into the danger of becoming a preaching person. And the sermon also is a mean-average state of ecstasy. Therefore it mirrors itself, even in the best ideas of composers, that in order to get through, they become insistent. Wolpe simply said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's a bad composition." [. . .]

I was that year in Darmstadt when Wolpe was there [1956], and I was there again when Cage came the first time [1958]. There is a connection, because again it is the proportion rather than the sequence. It could have happened also the other way round. It was one year Cage and the next year Wolpe, or Wolpe was one year and the next year Cage. In Darmstadt both had an analogous impact, both encouraged looseness. In contra-distinction to the Adorno opponents, who couldn't stand Adorno's language and found everything too stiff and abstract and theoretic, both Cage (inadvertently) and Wolpe (advertently) became constructive looseness. They loosened something. Something became fluid which had been of a viscosity you couldn't move. This viscosity that I'm at the moment denouncing was a part of the students, not of Darmstadt or of Steinecke's direction of Darmstadt. It had happened after two or three years of something. Suddenly these little cliques formed. And as it is in the tradition of the academic world, even when you attack academics and are an academic, you academically attack academia. [. . .]

The first response to Wolpe at Darmstadt was stupendous. Proportionen [1960] brought the house down. I claim still to this day that his performance was really what stupefied the people out of their wits. For them it was shameless. He stands there for a moment, and then he starts with a howl! Not "Ladies and Gentlemen", I mean such stuff: "DAS SIND ALSO. . . !" nicht? und "DIE ERSTEN ERLEBNISSE. . . !" [makes a grunt]. Everything. Animal noises. There is not a sentence that rests on its content. The content flowed on the inflection, on the projection to the next high point. Downbeat changes that were unexpected. He is composing, and he has trained it, he has learned it, he has done it. He rehearses. I was so happy. [. . .]

It holds to a large extent for John Cage. John Cage the performer is the historical landmark. His contents vary. They may even be absent. They may be present, they may be just hinted at. There may be drugs, or provocations, challenges, anything you want. But he performs everything with such a dedication to the profession of performer that my respect never flags. Even when he got angry in my own house, in my home as a guest, and got angry with me and wanted to leave, he performed that so brilliantly that I had to run after him, embrace him, and ask him please to continue his performance inside. Which he of course immediately understood. With Wolpe it never came to such dramatic meetings. Cage for me was a provocation. Wolpe was an invitation.

The effect of Cage was a breaking down of things taken for granted. Wolpe was deep enough that he showed things that were already known but were not taken seriously. Wolpe showed the life-necessity of certain awarenesses that have fallen by the wayside, and he brought them out to the knowledge of the people there. Due to the ideas of Stockhausen, the people were skilled to know about time proportions. They had not learned about intervallic proportions. So Wolpe picked (whether he knew it or not) that concept of proportion, and suddenly made it a life-elixir. It was something on which you can build your existence, whereas before it was just one further parameter. Which is a loosening that really happened, that things that had been for the first time sorted out waited to be integrated again. There Wolpe was an immense help. Cage, not. He came as an advocate: "Forget about all that. We have other things to worry about." So their content was distinct. Whether they have something to do with one another I would like to discuss in another conversation. Cage was imitated immediately, Wolpe not at all. Wolpe was rather quoted extensively. The students said, "Like Wolpe," and "Remember Wolpe," but they didn't do anything about it. If people don't want what they need, it's difficult to talk with them about it. Wolpe was needed. He has remained needed.

Herbert Br&quotn (1n (1918-2000) emigrated from Germany and studied with Wolpe at the Jerusalem Conservatory (1936-38). After a lecture tour of the United States in 1962, he was invited to the University of Illinois in 1963 primarily to do research on the significance of computer systems for composition. He was appointed professor of music. Interview: AC, Urbana, Illinois, 8 November 1984.

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John Cage

I may be wrong, because I'm not a good historian, but when I approached the idea of meeting Stefan or becoming aware of him for the first time, it seems to me that it was through David Tudor. And so I think in his generosity of introducing me to the friends he valued the most, he would certainly have brought me to Stefan. And I went several times to 110th Street, out where Stefan had an apartment with Irma Rademacher. And it was always filled with students who were absolutely devoted to him, so that one had the feeling, being there, that one was at the true center of New York. And it was almost an unknown center of New York. And that was what gave a very special strength to one's feeling about Stefan, that it was in a sense a privilege to be aware of him, since it was like being privy to an important secret.

In each person who was near Stefan, all those students, there was no divided feeling. There was no question of both liking and disliking him. One's feeling was entirely for him, it was unquestioning. And I've always thought that that way of having a friend or a teacher was better than the sometimes popular idea of quarreling with the teacher, or criticizing. Some schools of education think that you shouldn't quarrel with the teacher. I've always thought that you should take everything the teacher says as true. As long as you believe in the teacher, you shouldn't question anything he says. That's the way I was with Schoenberg, or Suzuki.

In a strange way he had the same kind of strength that Satie had for the people surrounding him. And you know that marvelous statement of Satie, that it is necessary to be uncompromising right up to the end. And that's typical Stefan. And you had that feeling with [Aaron] Copland or with [Virgil] Thomson, anyone, you wouldn't have lifted an eyebrow if there had been some kind of compromise. It would have seemed perfectly natural even with Stravinsky. But not with Stefan! And that was what was so important.

He must have been a very excellent teacher. And I think I would say that because there was variety and liveliness in the minds of the students. Whereas if you come into contact with the effects of Hindemith's teaching, you see nothing but a mind laid low.

John Cage (1912-1992) was born in Los Angeles. He moved to New York in 1933 to study composition and returned to California a year later to study with Schoenberg at U.C.L.A. At Seattle he met Merce Cunningham, with whom he began a lengthy collaboration as composer and performer for his dance company. He returned to New York in 1942, where he became a central figure in the new music community. Cage became a director of the Stefan Wolpe Society when it was founded in 1981 and generously supported its activities. Interview: AC, Toronto, 26 November 1984.

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John Carisi

I had come out of the army and had worked for a couple of bands including Ray McKinley, where I met Eddie Sauter, and that's how I got to Wolpe. I told him that I was scrapin' the bottom of the barrel. I'm stealin' from myself and I keep writing the same things. [Eddie] was funny. He went through a whole string [of teachers]. "I studied with Marion Bauer," and he named all of these big East Coast teachers. I'm not saying that that's who he said, but names like that. "But don't go to any of them. Go see a man by the name of Stefan Wolpe."

[Stefan] was living in 110th Street then, the big huge apartments they used to have. The first thing he wanted to know was what I did. So I showed him some of these scores, and I played some of these things. I remember him saying, "Aha, Prokofiev," which I was unaware of at the time. I said, "Oh, yeah?" His idea, of course, was to kind of place the student's ear development. Figure out where he was ear-wise, what he could tolerate. Was he up to Ravel and Debussy. I guess he hoped you were up to Schoenberg. But if you weren't, he worked from wherever you were and showed you how to go beyond that. He was very concrete, very to the point about how one does things. To him musical devices and means were part of one's arsenal. He said, "I give you these techniques to put in your arsenal, what you can use." And they were very practical, very known procedures. He would like you to find your own application for these things. As a matter of fact, he was very funny about that. If you brought something in and you demonstrated a certain kind of technique, he wouldn't even bother to name it, if you could do it. He'd say, "Oh, you know about this." I'd go, "About what?" He said, "Well, about this procedure here." I'd say, "Well, yeah, I've done that before." Well, O.K., that's it, and we wouldn't even bother with that. He never bothered with anything that you already knew. If you could demonstrate that you knew a certain technique, he went on from there.

And then later on he started the Contemporary Music School, which was on the list, and so I studied some more on the [G. I.] Bill of Rights and took some other things besides. He had great classes in that school, because they were small, and there were mostly professional people that had already good backgrounds, like myself, commercial musicians. No nonsense. I took another class with one of his other students, James Timmens, in ear training, which was invaluable. I also took a marvelous class with Stefan himself in analysis. We analysed Beethoven, Mozart, Bartök scores, whatever was up at the time. He had a marvelous approach. He didn't think that the study of any of the little details was of any importance. I remember one class where somebody was saying, "Well now this first motive Mozart took it and here he turned it upside down." You know, very detailed, four notes at a time kind of thing, where this came from, where that. He finally grew impatient and said, "Does everybody understand this?" And everybody said, more or less, "Yeah, we see that's O.K." He said, "Now what's important is where does he go, and why does he finish this section and initiate this new section?" The idea of trend, that was the point. What makes them change from this thing to this next thing. Especially with somebody like Mozart, almost without error, just about when you were getting tired of the first theme, bam, he was into this next theme. Oh, saved! That course was beautiful for that reason. This was for about a couple of semesters, about a year. At some point or another I think the school got into trouble financially and they couldn't keep going. They had these good people--Ralph Shapey and Jim Timmens--teaching there, Wolpe people who were oriented in this direction. First of all it extended all the possibilities, especially harmonically, which of course if you're an improviser immediately gets into that. You find out all these other notes that you can play besides the ones that you've been playing all along. For a chord that's distributed all over an area he used to call them constellations. Instead of C, G, B, the extensions of that were all available with the extra notes, the D, Fv, and the A, and so on. Also, and probably more important, that in the process of studying these techniques, which were basically twentieth-century, highly chromaticized if not atonal, you listened to a lot of the best examples of this. You listened to a lot of Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky. So your ear progressed to a point where, when you took it back to the jazz field, what one hears is already an extension of what you would ordinarily hear if you hadn't heard these things. [. . . ]

I think that Stefan picked up a marvelous appreciation for jazz in the listening. There's almost nothing in his music that's like jazz. Let me rephrase that. People talk about jazz as if it's with a capital J. I resent that highly because jazz is just another by-water of music, so in that sense it's related to all other music. If you're a musician the way Stefan was, a musician that knows the difference between Charlie Parker and some lesser player, or Stan Getz--I mean why would he pick Stan Getz, for instance? He knew. He heard. He said, "Wow!" Why? Because on the basis of music alone he recognizes this as superior music. Not because he suddenly understood some kind of art.

I think I took him to see Miles, or I might have even taken